Volunteers from across the
nation head southward
By TAMARA KOEHLER
Scripps Howard News Service

September 09, 2005
Friday

LAKE CHARLES, La. - The line of needy New Orleans evacuees wound
through the parking lot, then bottlenecked inside the narrow
hallways of the small American Red Cross center here in this
city 30 miles upstream from the Gulf of Mexico.

Camarillo, Calif., resident
and Red Cross volunteer Diane Campbell - who had worked since
dawn and, judging by the size of the crowd, would stay until
nightfall - surveyed the milling, anxious crowd and said there
was no place else she'd rather be.

"I told my husband this
kind of work almost feels like a calling," said Campbell,
41, who met her mate while volunteering on another disaster 13
years ago in Hawaii. "It's just something I have to do."

Her words are echoed almost
verbatim by scores of other volunteers, young and old, who have
answered the call to help victims of the nation's worst natural
disaster.

The Red Cross relief effort
for Katrina victims is the largest in its 125-year history. More
than 5,000 Red Cross volunteers have joined up to serve in more
than 470 shelters in 12 states, and more than 600 additional
volunteers are being deployed every day, according to the organization's
Web site.

In Lake Charles, thousands
of evacuees who left before Hurricane Katrina struck are stranded
in emergency shelters, hotels and the homes of relatives and
strangers.

Like their counterparts who
left the flooded city after disaster struck, they have lost everything.
They came to the American Red Cross for help in getting money
to tide them over after exhausting their bank accounts and credit
cards.

A few miles away in the Lake
Charles Civic Center, 3,000 evacuees who left before the storm
struck are getting back on their feet, thanks to volunteers like
Campbell.

Since her deployment to Houston,
Baton Rouge, La., and then finally Lake Charles, Campbell and
her fellow volunteers have worked practically nonstop getting
clothes, money, first aid and job information for scores of displaced
Louisiana residents.

Monica Kelsey, 33, is a mother
of two who used her two weeks of vacation to join the Red Cross
volunteer corps.

"There's an adrenaline
to giving; it's such a good, gratifying feeling," said the
native of Fort Wayne, Ind.

Said Campbell: "This is
something larger than we've ever seen in this country; we all
have to do something in any way we can."

The disaster's immensity was
brought home to many through television images and has also drawn
volunteers in their teens and early 20s out in droves.

Dozens of Web sites aimed at
Generation Y have sprung up on the Internet, informing young
people of ways to help and get involved. Site sponsors include
the Young Democrats of America and the Connecticut Young Lawyers
Association.

One site, http://dosomething.org,
offers high-school and college students ways "you can have
their back on the Gulf Coast." Suggestions include having
high-school students and sports teams round up pencils, pens
and backpacks for their peers who lost their homes and schools
in the disaster.

Teenage and college-age volunteers
in Lake Charles are turning out.

Lauren Davis, 20, of Lake Charles,
said she met a family through her church who needed clothes.
She brought the items to the Civic Center and saw the hordes
of other families in similar need there.